San Francisco — If you’re wary of shows with a political or sociological ax to grind, you should
be, for the most part. That’s because more often than not, credible characters and plots are pushed
to the background in favor of advocacy.

I admit that’s what I expected with WE’s new series The Divide, created by Richard
LaGravenese (Behind the Candelabra) and Tony Goldwyn (Scandal), premiering Wednesday night.
Instead, what I found was an intelligently nuanced, character-driven legal thriller first, and an
all-sides-represented discussion of possible defects in the justice system second.

Christine Rosa (Marin Ireland, Revolutionary Road) works for an organization called the
Innocence Initiative, a fictionalization of the very real Innocence Project. No one would want to
see an innocent person executed, but it’s personal for Christine because her own father is on death
row for something she knows he didn’t do and his appeals are all but exhausted.

Christine and colleague Clark Rylance (Paul Schneider, Parks and Recreation) are marshalling
their efforts to keep a former construction worker named Jared Bankowski (Chris Bauer, True Blood)
from being executed for the murder of all but one member of a family 12 years earlier. Bankowski is
no saint, and has been on death row long enough to stop hoping for a reprieve. His mother, Ida (Ann
Dowd, The Leftovers) is a hateful piece of work, but not to the point where we could overlook
Bankowski’s culpability if, in fact, he did participate in the murders.

The Divide doesn’t fall into a facile delineation of good guys vs. bad guys, which not only
makes it credible, but also keeps a tight hold on our attention. On the other side of “the divide”
is District Attorney Adam Page (Damon Gupton, Rake), who prosecuted the original case and is
politically ambitious. His wife, Billie Page (Nia Long, House of Lies), is also an attorney, but
working in the private sector. Still, she has her doubts about the case.

Page’s father, Isaiah (Clarke Peters, Trem) is the Philadelphia police commissioner and has
no doubts that the case against Bankowski is a righteous one.

Adam Page is sure the case is solid as well, but he has a conscience and is not so ambitious
that it would keep him from re-opening the case if there were reason to do so.

Almost every character is developed with an intriguingly complex moral point of view,
augmented by the fact that Bankowski and his co-defendant, Terry Kucik (Joe Anderson, The River)
are white, as are Christine and Clark, the district attorney and his family are African American,
as were the victims of the crime.

Does race play a role here? To an extent, it does, but not in any type of kneejerk, formulaic
way. Instead, The Divide reflects the reality of race in contemporary American cities such as
Philadelphia.

The pilot episode relies on the ticking-clock template often employed when TV has a guy who’s
about to die by lethal injection. Yet, along the way, we become primarily fascinated with the
characters, how they are created, how they think, how much they might be examining their own
thoughts about the justice system.

Yes, there is a message behind the show’s characters and storyline. Or, more to the point,
multiple messages, because the strength of the show is that it reflects the truth that the justice
system was created and is administered by men and women, who have complicated thoughts and points
of view, and who might mean well, or be blinded by their own frailty and ambition.